Carrier iMessage not saving original photo

[ghostanime2001]

Hey guys, so I'm using an iphone 6 on ios 12.5.5. When I save a picture in imessage that I have sent in the past, ios renames the original photo with a new name that's incremented after the last photo in iphoto. For example, in imessage, there is an image sent that says "IMG_5835.JPG" then when I click on that image and on the top right select the box with the arrow pointed up and select "save image" which saves to the internal storage, it has a different name as "IMG_7708.JPG" The last image saved was a screenshot I took of the imessage conversation window and it's name when imported to my PC was "IMG_7707.JPG"

Does anyone know why its like that ? How do I get the original filename with the original date created, date modified and date accessed of the photo ? Where does ios save the original photo ? How do I get the original ?

Thanks

 

[now i see it]

Any photo that’s copied into the photos app gets renamed. There’s no way to keep the original file name.
It’s how the iOS photos app works. Supposedly this behavior exists so that it’s impossible to have identical file name conflicts.
Some metadata from the file doesn’t get overwritten, such as camera and exposure and location data if any exists.

There’s a reason why the iOS photos app doesn’t show file names - and this is it. They’re meaningless to the end user because they are automatically generated.

 

[ghostanime2001]

In android when a photo gets taken it shows the date and the time in the filename itself and if the photo is copied to other apps such as snapchat or instagram or anything else, it gets renamed according to the app's specifications and then a duplicate is created. But if I am organizing my photos from my entire phones, locating the original photo by the filename becomes so much easier and it pinpoints to the ACTUAL original photo. By using android's camera app such as my galaxy s8 if i were to take a photo today (July 2, 2022) it would be something like 20220702_122403.jpg which means July 2, 2022 12:24:03 PM. In other apps it would be renamed to something else.

So then is there a logical way to get back to the "most original photo" by going back to the lowest "number" in the filename ? For example, when downloading the same photo from different conversations in imessage to my iphone 6, all the filenames are different and are incremented by +1

My dad had imported the photos maybe a year ago on his laptop from the internal storage on his iphone. But, when I saw some photos from imessage were sent, I mistakenly thought those pictures were different when some of them weren't and they had +1 filenames incremented so I thought I need to re-download those photos from imessage again to the iphone and import them to my PC.

So now I'm trying to organize photos, videos from 2 sources (one from my dads PC, and one from my PC) with different filenames trying to find the earliest phot with the lowest number in the "IMG_XXXX.jpg" in the filename. Is this suffice to understand am I confusing myself and others? Please let me know. Thanks.

 

[now i see it]

If a photo gets duplicated, it looks identical to the original since it’s a cloned copy. So it doesn’t matter if the dupe is used or the original.

If a photo gets compressed then sent, (iMessage) then it will be degraded a bit due to the compression. It will also have a smaller file size than the original.

When comparing two seemingly identical photos, trying to discern which one is the original, you need to look at the metadata.
There an iOS app called Photo Investigator that lets you view a photo’s metadata on an iPhone. You can see the creation date and modification date along with the file size of course. Check out the TIFF metadata for file creation date.

‎The Photo Investigator

‎• See all available photo and video metadata: location, filesize, xattr, albums, date, camera and much more. • Edit / Remove location (incl. direction & altitude), Caption, Copyright, and Date (requires in-app purchase) • Extension to see photo metadata in Messages, Photos, and other apps. •...

apps.apple.com

There are utilities for a Window’s PC that can do the same thing.

It’ll be slow going since you’ve got to open up each photo file and view its metadata, but it’s certainly possible to find the original.

 

[ghostanime2001]

If a photo gets duplicated, it looks identical to the original since it’s a cloned copy. So it doesn’t matter if the dupe is used or the original.

If a photo gets compressed then sent, (iMessage) then it will be degraded a bit due to the compression. It will also have a smaller file size than the original.

When comparing two seemingly identical photos, trying to discern which one is the original, you need to look at the metadata.
There an iOS app called Photo Investigator that lets you view a photo’s metadata on an iPhone. You can see the creation date and modification date along with the file size of course. Check out the TIFF metadata for file creation date.

‎The Photo Investigator

‎• See all available photo and video metadata: location, filesize, xattr, albums, date, camera and much more. • Edit / Remove location (incl. direction & altitude), Caption, Copyright, and Date (requires in-app purchase) • Extension to see photo metadata in Messages, Photos, and other apps. •...

apps.apple.com

There are utilities for a Window’s PC that can do the same thing.

It’ll be slow going since you’ve got to open up each photo file and view its metadata, but it’s certainly possible to find the original.

From my dad's iphone 6, I see duplicate file sizes pictures but that have the name "20190608_135903_IMG_5766.JPG" it seems like android photo name convention and iphone name convention has been combined

At the bottom are below pictures of what the original filename is supposed to be. Also if I set up a SMB fileshare between this iphone 6 and windows 10, will the date and time of the photo be preserved? will it be preserved for folders as well as files? Thanks...

 

[now i see it]

Transfer a couple photos to the PC and see what happens. The creation date metadata shouldn’t be lost.
Forget about naming photos in iOS. The photos app will change them.

iOS now lets you easily add captions to photos to make them easily searchable.